The Price of Bread: Poverty, Purchasing Power, and The Victorian Laborer's Standard of Living

ost writers on the Industrial
Revolution in Victorian Britain agree that the progress of the nineteenth
century was marked by a gradual, uneven, but measurable improvement in the standard
of living, especially towards the end of the
century. This general conclusion, however, masks some very weighty
economic and social hardship concerning the day to day lives of Victorian laborers, who constituted the bulk of the population. These
hardships are notable because they contrast with living standards for laborers
and artisans that are documented to be very much higher in some centuries
preceding the Victorian age.

Thorold Rogers spent his professional lifetime meticulously documenting wages and prices in England for
six centuries, including the nineteenth century. Based on purchasing power
of wages data, he calls the fifteenth century the Golden Age of the Laborer in
England (326). Wages, of course, only have comparative meaning when contemporary
prices of commodities are known. It is especially true of the artisan and
laboring class that their wages are spent, in large measure, on food, rent, and
fuel, and in past times food was the greatest of these expenditures. For
this reason, a wage or money standard of living, in pence per day
per person, is far less useful for comparative purposes than a bread standard
of living, in pounds of bread purchasable per day per person. All that
is required is to know the cost of bread at any point in time in which the
purchasing power of two different wage points in time are being compared.

Wages are always referenced in historical material in shillings and
pence,
usually per week. The prices of wheat, bread, and meat can almost always
be found as contemporary values to laborers' wages, although the units of these
prices puzzle present-day readers. Throughout medieval and
much of modern British history, wheat was priced per quarter, or eight
bushels. As a bushel of wheat weighs sixty pounds, the quarter was
equivalent to 480 pounds of wheat. Four quarters are approximately equal
to one ton.

Bread was commonly sold in medieval and Renaissance England as the gallon
loaf (also called the half-peck loaf), which weighs 8 pounds and 11 ounces, or 8.6875 pounds. Later,
including during the Victorian period, it was nearly always sold as the quartern loaf, which was made with exactly 3.5 pounds (or 1/4 stone) of wheaten
flour, and whose finished weight was approximately 4.33 pounds. Thus, two
quartern loaves of finished bread weigh the same as the older and larger gallon
loaf.

With this information, it is possible to arrive at the purchasing power of
wages in pounds of bread per day per person. A pound of raw wheat may be
converted to a pound of finished bread by multiplying by 1.25, although most
writers ignore this small difference and simply equate the price of a pound of
wheat with a pound of finished bread. The price of butcher's meat, sold as
"pieces" in the shop (probably similar to the stew meat of today), is
usually about three times the per pound price of bread.

The Speenhamland
allowance scale enacted in 1795 effectively set a floor on the income of
laborers according to the price of bread. When the gallon loaf cost 1s,
the laborer was to have a weekly income of 3s for himself. The per pound
cost of bread at 1s/gallon is 12d / 8.6875 pounds or 1.38 d/pound. Weekly
wages of 3s are equal to 36p / 7 days or 5.14 d/day. Dividing wages by the
cost of bread gives 5.14 d/day / 1.38 d/pound = 3.72 pounds of bread per day
for a single laborer. This is an important figure to remember as the
Speenhamland allowance. As a pound of bread provides about 1100 calories,
the allowance gave the laborer a total of 4100 calories per day. An
agricultural laborer doing 8-10 hours of vigorous work can easily require 3000
calories/day. It is evident that the Speenhamland allowance provided just
above the bare means of subsistence. The Speenhamland scale also provided
an allowance for family members. For a laborer, his wife, and two
children, the weekly allowance was set at 7s 6d. Performing the above
calculation for the family gives 90d/week / 7 days/week / 1.38 d/pound / 4
persons = 2.33 pounds of bread per day per person for the family of four.

The Speenhamland allowance is closely related to the nutritional subsistence
level and the poverty line. In the 1860s Joseph
Rowntree had carried out two major surveys into poverty in Britain.
Inspired by his father's work and the study by Charles
Booth, 1889), Seebohm
Rowntree decided to carry out his own
investigations into poverty in York.
Rowntree spent two years on the project and the results of his scholarly pioneering study, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, were published in 1902. Rowntree's study provided a wealth of statistical data on wages,
hours of work, nutritional needs, food consumed, health and housing. He found
empirically that in 1899 it cost 3s 3d a week for food to maintain a
full-grown adult on a diet free of nutritional deficiency. In that year
bread cost 1.32 d/pound. This corresponds to 39d/week / 7days/week / 1.32
d/pound = 4.22 pounds of bread per day per adult, or a value very close to the
Speenhamland allowance. Rowntree obtained
detailed dietary expenditures and food quantities from family budgets and workhouse administration
records, and set this purchasing power as the level of subsistence. Later
researches into poverty in the early twentieth century showed that food
represented about one-third of total necessary expenditures for a family in
poverty, so the subsistence food level was multiplied by three to arrive at the
poverty line. For many years the poverty line was defined by governments
as an income equivalent to 12.5 pounds of bread per day per person for a family
of four, and the price of bread was closely monitored by governments. As can be seen, the Speenhamland allowance for the years 1795-1834 was far more Spartan than later definitions of what constituted poverty.

The following table was constructed from various sources to show the purchasing
power of workers at points in time from the fifteenth century until the close of
the Victorian era. In each instance, wages and purchasing power are shown
with respect to a single adult male laborer, and are not adjusted for family
size. The Speenhamland allowance and Rowntree's subsistence level are
shown as reference values. An attempt was made to avoid selection bias in
this comparison table by choosing representative values for wages during a
period, and not the highest or lowest wages. The table is valid only for
common laborers and artisans such as masons and carpenters; it is not intended
to reflect the higher-skilled professions such as architects, draftsmen,
doctors, and lawyers, or such occupations as shopkeeping, insurance, and international
trade.

Year

Wage Earner

Weekly
Wages
s/d

Wheat
Price
s/d per quarter

Bread
Price
d/lb

Bread
Purchasing
Power
lb/day/person

Multiple of
Speenhamland
Allowance

References

1450

Agricultural Laborer

2/0

5/11.75

0.15

22.94

6.17

Rogers (327-330)

1450

Carpenter, Mason

3/0

5.11.75

0.15

34.41

9.25

Rogers (327-330)

1795

Speenhamland Allowance

3/0

--

1.38

3.72

1.00

Hammond (I: 158-160)

1798

Handloom Weaver

30/0

74/0

1.85

27.80

7.47

Gaskell (376)

1831

Handloom Weaver

5/6

83/0

2.08

4.53

1.22

Gaskell (376)

1833

Factory Worker (Textile)

33/8

--

1.93

29.90

8.04

Baines (443)

1843

Factory Worker (Pottery)

39/0

--

1.80

37.14

9.98

Pike (196); Rogers (539)

1865

Town Laborer

3/9

--

1.80

3.57

0.96

Porter (176); Rogers (539)

1865

Carpenter, Mason

6/6

--

1.80

6.19

1.66

Porter (176); Rogers (539)

1865

Engineer

7/6

--

1.80

7.14

1.92

Porter (176); Rogers (539)

1899

Rowntree Subsistence

3/3

--

1.32

4.22

1.13

Rowntree (90ff)

1912

Carriage Washer

19/6

--

1.30

25.71

6.91

Reeves (133)

1912

Delivery Courier

26/0

--

1.30

34.29

9.22

Reeves (137)

The agricultural laborer in the mid fifteenth century could buy 23 pounds of
bread with a day's wages. In fact, he was frequently fed for free by the
proprietor, and the meals were not charged against his wages, so his purchasing
power was even higher. The more skilled artisan could buy 34 pounds of
bread, which puts him at a standard of living which is 9 times higher than the
Speenhamland subsistence allowance. It is obvious that these wages
provided sufficient income for a wife and children.

By any measure the eighteenth-century handloom weaver working his loom at home was a skilled
artisan. In 1798 his purchasing power was 28 pounds of bread, again easily
enough to support a family, although somewhat less than the carpenter earned in
1450. With the introduction of the power loom under the factory system,
his wages fell to a mere one-sixth of their former purchasing power by
1831. To put a more human face on this statistic, imagine a 25-year-old
hand loom weaver in 1798 with a family, good home, and income; by the time he was 58
years old, his income was reduced to the subsistence level, and getting worse
with each passing year.

Those laborers who "got with the program", left their home shop and
entered the factory, especially a skilled weaver such as the man in our example,
could improve their lot. By 1833 an experienced weaver working a power
loom in a cotton textile mill was earning enough money to buy 30 pounds of bread
a day. In some industries such as pottery and metal working, the wages
were substantially higher. Yet these high wages for adult factory workers do not
tell the whole story. Whenever possible, mill owners employed children
preferentially over adults, at a fraction of the adult wage. The
increasing automation of the factory invited cheap child labor to tend the
machines, pushing down the number of well-paying adult jobs, which were
increasingly of a supervisory role. Unemployment (or as the Victorian
economists called it, "overpopulation") increased in the adult
laborers' ranks, and poverty surged, defining what would eventually come to be called
the "condition of England" question.

By 1865 the purchasing power of even a skilled town laborer working his
trade had fallen to a level of less than twice that of the Speenhamland
allowance, putting the great bulk of independent town laborers barely above
subsistence. Booth estimated that around the turn of the century 31 percent
of the population of London was living in poverty. This estimate was
confirmed by the studies of Rowntree in the City of York, where he found
the
proportion of the inhabitants in poverty (that is, below subsistence) was 28 percent.

The benefits of the industrial system came to the bulk of the laboring
population only late in the Victorian era. Some of these benefits are not
directly measured by the bread-purchasing-power standard. It has been said
that in 1800, not one person in fifty living in England wore socks, but by 1900
not one person in fifty was without them. Social mobility started to
improve at the end of the century as education became more widespread. With the passing of Victoria,
living standards of average Britons continued to increase. In 1912 the
unskilled carriage washer was earning enough to purchase 26 pounds of bread per
day, and a courier driving a horse-drawn delivery truck was earning enough to
buy 34 pounds. Yet it is interesting to observe that this is exactly the
purchasing power of a carpenter or mason working his trade in 1450. For
many Britons in the laboring classes, the Industrial Revolution took away what
they once had centuries before, and only grudgingly gave it all back by the
close of Victoria's reign.